DSP : Java Glossary

DSP (Digital Signal Processor). A high
performance CPU (Central Processing Unit) typically used to process streams of data, such as
Internet cable, sound or video in real time. The CPU
typically has some ability to process data in parallel, on the order of 8 multiplies
at a time. It is up to the programmer to schedule the operations which can safely be
done in parallel, which will not compete for resources in the
CPU.
In contrast, in a Pentium CPU, a part of the CPU
figures out the parallelism on the fly, but rarely to the same degree.